Among the myriad microtrends that have been lately sweeping through the kind of bar that stocks 17 different kinds of bitters and more brands of rye whiskey than vodka is one that involves slipping animal protein into the drinks—and I don’t mean eggs or dairy. Whether it’s an attempt to clear the bar of vegans or a way of appropriating some of the cultural juju attached to the bad-boy, porkophilic chef, this incorporation of meat juices, fats and even solids has produced some interesting, if occasionally challenging, drinks and a whole lot of hoopla about the novelty and daringness of the whole idea.
The average age of the staff and clientele in these bars hovers somewhere around 30. If they had spent the late 1970s and early 1980s loitering in cocktail bars rather than watching theElectric Company, they would know that the combination is nothing new. In fact, from the late 1950s until some time in the Reagan administration, there were few drinks with more cachet than the concoction known as the “Bullshot.”
Essentially a Bloody Mary with beef bouillon or consommé in place of the tomato juice, it was apparently thought up by the white-coated technicians behind the bar at Detroit’s Caucus Club in 1952 or thereabouts. A couple of years of rumination, perhaps chiefly (as Newsweeksuggested) in Hollywood, and suddenly in 1957 it was everywhere. In January, you hadBroadway columnist Earl Wilson predicting it would catch on “because it’s so full of vitamins,” while, 3,000 miles away, one of the Los Angeles gossip columnists was proclaiming that the “Downtown Boys” in “Ivy League suits” who hung out at the swank Cook’s Steakhouse had adopted it as their own. By July, Dorothy Kilgallen (another Broadwaycolumnist) was pronouncing it “the most popular drink among the fashion models.”
David Wondrich
2 ounces vodka
4 ounces beef bullion
fresh lemon juice to taste
black pepper to taste
salt or celery salt to taste
hot sauce to taste
Worcestershire sauce to taste
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